Have you considered using PieFed? 🤔

If it's between Matrix and Zulip, it's Zulip, hands down. I run into way too many problems with Matrix, and public rooms usually aren't encrypted regardless.

I'm going to call an end to this poll at this point because 35 responses seems like plenty.

Here are the results:

It is surprising and gratifying how many people would be fine to just go all-in on PieFed. Bold.

I think it's fair to say that Zulip is not very popular as every scenario with Zulip in it did poorly. At the same time every scenario with Matrix in it did Ok.

These results suggest we should move the discussions formally held on Zulip over to a PieFed community and keep Matrix as-is.

Alright, here are my thoughts. I voted PieFed + Zulip + Matrix, but really I think my answer can be a bit broader than that. Here are the three things I think we need and I don't think PieFed covers them fully yet:

1. Somewhat persistent store of knowledge (can be PieFed)

This would be a place where asynchronous discussions can be had or questions can be asked and answered about how to do things regarding development. See something like this exchange I had with DeckPacker as an example. It illustrates everything that this mode of communication needs and PieFed can provide:

• It was a very technical question, so it would be relevant in a focused dev community
• It wasn't time-sensitive, so the asynchronous nature of posts/comments works fine
• Future devs could have a similar question, so having it be somewhat accessible in the future works well

This currently kind of exists within codeberg issues/PRs as well as within our documentation, but someplace with a lower barrier of entry for the dev-curious to ask technical questions might be nice.

2. Realtime support and troubleshooting (mostly Matrix currently)

The needs that this channel of communication needs to meet are realtime troubleshooting and support of other piefed admins that are experimenting or having issues. I personally don't think there is going to be any real way to not have this be matrix. That is where the vast majority of the threadiverse admins and app developers already are. Also, lots of this stuff doesn't need to persist long-term, nor should it.

3. Internal, non-public discussions (currently mainly Zulip)

This channel is one where the access control is much stricter and only intended individuals can view. Currently, most of the piefed.social admins/staff and the core maintainers are active on Zulip. With Zulip making it relatively easy to private message and create private channels/topics, it has worked well for this purpose. I guess that private communities would work for this in PieFed, but it would mean that everybody that is invited needs to make a piefed.social account since private communities don't federate. In practice, that's not that different than people needing to make a zulip account I guess.

an option that seems to be surprisingly absent is discussion where the source lives, on codeberg. imo it's very useful to have persistent discussions close to the source.

while i still consider matrix to be the best option for chat on this list, primarily due to federation, it's mostly useful for ephemeral conversations. finding old messages in matrix is often a pain, knowledge isn't searchable (search engines won't see this at all), and even new joiners typically won't have "all" history. structure with threads is also still very limited due to there still being a fair number of clients without thread support.

having discussions in codeberg issues also makes it a lot easier simpler to find context when you e.g. look at a commit, find the associated PR, then see the linked issue with the discussion.

edit to add more info:

what i've also seen in various projects in the past is when more complex issues have been discussed in chat, that a summary and key elements of the discussion or even a copy of the conversation will be persisted to e.g. issues, to allow for easier discussion (real time communication can work a lot faster and more efficient when there is some back and forth) while also ensuring that the information isn't lost over time.

i voted for piefed + matrix, but in reality i'd prefer codeberg + matrix. with federation, codeberg + zulip would likely also be a good alternative.

If only Zulip supported federation... ideally on top of matrix or apub....

@rimu while I think Zulip is interesting there is a large barrier of a ton of people not using it already, at least matrix has an active userbase of fediverse developers

Altough it's already decided, i support your choice, that's a good decision.

Here is my point of view :)

I choose piefed community even tought i prefer zulip for its chat organization. It works as a git page where we can resolve topic, create topic based on discussion. It is well made and and their app do a very good job.

However, as you pointed out, it didn't attract new users for many reasons as being in another chat, create new account (while having so many accounts elsewhere)...

I think we can make piefed closer to zulip. Piefed already have the most important feature of zulip :

• moving post to the correct category.

Maybe we are missing two things ?

• subcategories ? for that we have flair. We can turn some flair into tabs. A dropmenu where you can chose the flair ?
• moving comments on a new post or categorize comment by topic ? (Maybe it is only revalant on live discussion)

Zulip and Piefed.

Not sure if I'm allowed to vote. I tried to add options for bad word customisation during the code jam, but failed.

I personally like and recommend Matrix. A significant amount of Fediverse developers are on matrix, including the Fediverse developer network.

Piefed could run their own of they wish.

Encrypted comma for private chats. Threads can be used for tracking specific issues.

There are multiple bots that can be run. RSS not is built in. Us folks doing Owncast streaming have made bots to announce when someone goes live.

Matrix is seeing significant growth in EU.

It's become quite easy to install and get set up.

There's already a good piefed presence in matrix.

Multiple clients in the works already. Commet seems like one folks really enjoy.

@rimu Signal group? #DeltaChat group?

Movim, perhaps

At first I intended to only watch but then I had a thought:

• fediverse is an excercise in re-decentralization of the internet. That means we've been living in a centralized one for so long, that sometimes our thought patterns might need to be challenged

  • if "piefed only" gets chosen and piefed is down - centralized approach is a problem
  • if a refactor requires to break some things for a bit of time - centralized approach is a problem

  putting all eggs in one basket create single point of failure

Now, I do agree that I feel like there is little knowledge about threadiverse on the threadiverse itself. But does it mean everything has to move to one platform?

I feel Unix philosophy has been in general good intuition. In the scope of that post:

• Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
• Write programs to work together.

(...)

Nero burning ROM was the best burning software. Then it started getting more and more features and it deteriorated

Some time ago there was an article and discussion on fediverse about pixelfed not presenting all posts, only those that contain images. If that isn't a threat to fediverse, etc
One of popular reactions to that has been " if it did, how would it be different from mastodon then?"

So maybe what is really missing is some Zulip+/Matrix integration instead of centralization?

i have not found a chat I like but I like piefed so....

@rimu i won't vote because i'm not contributor but I spent many time building communities around such project. i agree that matrix can be lame but the federated aspect is the killer feature. It remove the friction of having to create yet another account. That's why zulip, mattermost and other fails to gain traction. Also the fact that so many activitypub projects are already on matrix make it the place to be for people involved in multiple projects. I would keep matrix and bet on its improvement